The request came by email from a fourth-grade classroom. The teachers of Marielle and Sylvana, the identical twin daughters of Marissa Mayer, wanted a slide for each girl’s birthday on December 10. As Mayer told it to the New York Times, they also wanted three bullet points on what made the child special.
Mayer was Google’s twentieth hire in 1999, ran its search for a decade, and ran Yahoo from 2012 to 2017. She did not write the bullet points herself. She typed the question into Dazzle, the AI assistant her startup released in late September. “It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover,” she told Alexandra Alter of the Times, as The Next Web recounted after the profile ran.
Empathetic. Creative. An animal lover. The words are kind ones. They would also describe a great many ten-year-olds.
The verdict on X
Users on X were quick to object that she had handed the question to a machine, as Caitlin Hornik reported for The Independent. Several retellings of the Times profile, Mediaite’s among them, said the assignment had overwhelmed her and called it an impossible task. Fast Company tried to explain why one parenting anecdote had touched such a nerve.
A reflection, not a finding: the powerful seldom notice when a private habit becomes a public creed. For an ordinary parent, asking a machine about your own child is a small and slightly embarrassing secret. For the founder of the machine, it is the product working as designed.
Monday’s clarification
On Monday, October 26, Mayer answered on X. She thanked the Times and said she wanted to add context.
To be clear, I didn’t use Dazzle because I was overwhelmed by making a slide. I used it because summing up your child in a few bullets feels laughably limiting.
Her team, she wrote, had just got an early prototype running, and she pasted the teachers’ email into it “to test its limits.” She had expected it to fail, “since most facial recognition can’t even tell my identical twins apart.” Instead, she wrote, “Dazzle blew me away.” It told the girls apart and dug up kindergarten projects she had forgotten, “the ‘snake denomizer’ and the ‘sandcat playground’”, linking them to the child Marielle is now. Mayer said she combined its suggestions with some of her own and showed the slide to Zack Bogue. He was floored, she wrote, and asked how she had remembered such details. She admitted the prototype had found them.
Then the clarification became a pitch. Mayer cited the founding paper on transformers, “Attention Is All You Need,” and argued that camera rolls are “a decades-long record of what we pay attention to.” She listed what users had recently asked Dazzle to do. It drew up spelling lists from photos of a child’s schoolwork. It spotted, in the backgrounds of someone’s photos, a book from their book club list that they already owned. It suggested art to hang over a new sofa, and pulled a costume for an esoteric party out of clothes already in the user’s closet. “We take 5 billion photos a day,” she wrote, “often wondering if we’ll ever look at them again.”
The archive in the pocket
Dazzle reads the photos on a user’s phone so it can answer questions, carry out tasks and make suggestions. According to a launch report syndicated on Yahoo Tech, it went live on September 29. It grew out of Sunshine, Mayer’s earlier company, whose team found that about 60 percent of a typical camera roll is worth sharing. The other 40 percent, she said, is “all the stuff we need to get done”: a dentist’s appointment card, a photo of a child’s cleats as a reminder to buy the next size up. She argues people may trust an AI with their pictures more than with their email and messages, and says Dazzle throws away anything its AI marks as sensitive.
Futurism put the startup’s valuation at $35 million. The Times counted 10 engineers. Its rivals include Meta’s Muse, which has 10 million users, in a crowded race to build agents that act for their owners, and whose mistakes become their owners’ mistakes.
Mayer told the Times she thought Dazzle might appeal especially to women. “Women, this is my own bias, tend to take more photos and are more visual, and so being able to work with A.I. in a visual medium is fun,” she said. She added that it works just as well for men, and that some power users spend hours a day in it. Alter asked whether it was depressing to picture AI planning birthdays, gifts and family holidays.
“I haven’t really thought that through,” Mayer said.
From search to the camera roll
The road to Dazzle runs through failure. Her startup abandoned its first apps, Sunshine Contacts and Shine, and Mayer told the Times the idea for Dazzle came from Shine. Earlier this month she told Fortune that anyone claiming to know how AI will play out is “either lying or arrogant or both.” Asked by the Times how few women lead AI companies, she named Fei-Fei Li, who sold World Labs to AMD, and said gender balance in tech “will come in time.”
The teachers asked for three bullet points. By Mayer’s account they got a slide built partly from a girl’s forgotten kindergarten inventions, found by software her mother’s company is trying to sell. Then millions of strangers got a product demonstration.